…due to lack of space, but it was fun:
In a recent meeting on teaching, experts opined to my colleagues and me on the evils of lecture courses, which they termed “one-way delivery.” Most of us never taught that way and have never been taught that way; those Power Pointing for us, however, and only accepting comments that mirrored what they were saying, were enacting precisely the teaching format they were advocating against. In college I had history with Natalie Zemon Davis and Leon Litwack, French with Gérard Genette, and philosophy with Hans Sluga. They took the occasional question in a large lecture but would also visit discussion sections, stand around after class talking with students, and hold conversation hours in cafés. I tried to imagine what I would have thought if rather than “write and deliver their own lectures” on primary texts and ongoing research, they had organized the class into groups and walked around facilitating the use of a commercial textbook. Of course, these are the professors whose lectures, in the brave new world of College, Inc., would be piped into every class. This, it seems, is utterly different from what we do now, namely, assign and discuss readings from major scholars. But I digress.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 